A massive GTA VI leak last year shook the gaming world when more than 90 video clips showing in-development gameplay of the highly anticipated game were posted online.
According to a new report from BBC, a court found an 18-year-old teenager from Oxford responsible for leaking exclusive clips from the unreleased GTA VI game. At the time of the leak, the GTA VI hacker was already on bail for allegedly hacking chip manufacturer NVIDIA and an intrusion at the UK phone group BT Group.
The teenager in question, Arion Kurtaj, was a vital member of the Lapsus$ hacking group, which has been related to several high-profile attacks, including Microsoft, Uber, NVIDIA, and Rockstar Games.
As per BBC, the police authorities had kept Kurtaj in a UK Travelodge hotel for safety reasons, as rival hackers had “doxxed” him by releasing detailed information about him and his family online. Further, the GTA VI hacker had strict bail conditions, which included a ban from using the internet that obviously did not stop him from continuing his hacks.
Kurtaj found a way to bypass the restriction and carried out the infamous mega GTA VI leak on September 18, 2022, reportedly just by using a mouse, a keyboard, a smartphone, and an Amazon Fire TV stick.
The GTA VI hacker was “caught red handed” when the City of London Police searched his Travelodge hotel. They found the Fire Stick plugged into his hotel TV, which allowed him to infiltrate cloud computing services through his newly bought smartphone, keyboard, and mouse.
His final hack against Rockstar Games, described as his “most audacious,” was done from the hotel’s privacy. He had posted in the company’s Slack messaging service to all employees, stating: “I am not a Rockstar employee, I am an attacker.”
He claimed to have downloaded all of GTA VI’s data and threatened to release the source code if Rockstar didn’t contact him via Telegram’s messaging app in the next 24 hours.
Besides Kurtaj, another 17-year-old has also been convicted for his involvement in the activities of the Lapsus$ gang. As Kurtaj and the unnamed underage accomplice are autistic, psychiatrists deemed them unfit to stand trial.
This means the jurors were asked to determine whether or not they believed the alleged crimes were committed, not if they were done with criminal intent.
Both Kurtaj and his 17-year-old co-conspirator have been convicted and will be sentenced at a later date. While Kutraj was arrested in September 2022 and has been in custody ever since, his 17-year-old accomplice is still out on bail.
The trial was held in the Southwark Crown Court in London for seven weeks. The investigation and court case is still ongoing.
